Magicka Devs Roll Out New Developer Diary Detailing Upcoming PvP Mode

The mages at Paradox Interactive and Arrowhead Studios have unveiled a new developer diary and screens that give insight into the creation of the upcoming free update introducing an all new Player vs Player game mode in Magicka.

The developer diaries will be released on a weekly basis, so attention all trigger-happy wizards: the time to finally put your wizardly training to test is close at hand. And by “training” though, we really just mean purposely blowing up your friends.

Oh wait, you were doing that already? Well, soon you’ll be able to “officially” duel your companions. Put on your robe, grab your sword and staff, and bring your game face because we will be seeing you in the arena very soon. Please note that you’ll be the ones in the actual arena, we’ll be outside of it like a bunch of pansy aristocrats.
From the first developer diary by Johan Pilestedt, game designer for Magicka:“Taking a hard look at PvP—you know, blasting friends to bits—we noticed that spamming ice shards, often with arcane and lightning, was a very good tactic. Further testing confirmed this. Even further testing confirmed this even further. In short, just spamming the same arcane ice shards over and over was an easy way of winning 8/10 competitions. Yeah, fun stuff! But we knew that we had to do something about the balance—the question was what.”

Magicka is an action-adventure game set in a rich fantasy world based on Norse mythology. The player assumes the role of a wizard from a sacred order tasked with the ultimate goal of stopping an evil sorcerer who has thrown the world into turmoil, his evil creations besieging the forces of good.

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Managing Editor of ManaPool, Peter lives in York, UK and is a great fan and master of turn-based strategy games. If he isn't playing one of those, you'll probably find him in a role-playing game instead. He's definitely not afraid to provide a straight up opinion on any game and has a strong like for indie developers. We all start small, after all.